


cycle

by MotherMaple



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: (at least I think I'm funny), Baby snakes learn about the birds and the bees, F/M, Fluff, Humor, Implied Sexual Content, Menstruation, Sex Education
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-30 05:00:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21422590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherMaple/pseuds/MotherMaple
Summary: Sex Ed is canceled at Riverdale High, and FP Jones isn't having it.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 101
Kudos: 329
Collections: 6th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees, 6th Bughead Fanfiction Awards — Winners!





	cycle

**Author's Note:**

> We get a lot of requests for period fics at the B&G, so I thought I'd write one.

The uptight prudes and hypocritical dinosaurs on the Riverdale Public School Board are full of shit. 

FP Jones knows it, Nurse Muggs knows it, and smug Alice Cooper (nee Smith) with her brooches and her pressed suits and her secret past sure as hell knows it. 

Whatever Penelope Blossom, with her fat checkbook and her sanctimonious smile, says, taking sex ed out of the high school is not going to take sex out of the high school. 

Like HBO isn’t a thing.

Like every single person on that board didn’t fuck around under the bleachers, or in the bed of someone’s pickup at the drive-in, or in the basement when Daddy wasn’t home, back when they were the horny teenagers. 

Bullshit. 

And FP Jones has made many bad decisions in his life - hell, he’s lucky he didn’t knock up some poor girl in high school himself - but one thing he_ isn’t _ is stupid. The kids that aren’t already having sex will be soon, and most of them are ignorant enough to screw up their lives for good. 

He’s seen plenty of naive Serpent girls, fresh off that God-forsaken dance, seduced by some smarmy Northside boy and left for worthless once the novelty wore off. Seen even more Serpent boys brag about getting lucky behind the bar. Seen too many of them trying to figure out childcare, drop out of school, and end up right back where the cycle of poverty dropped them, with a brand new clutch of baby snakes. 

No more. 

If Waldo Weatherbee isn’t going to teach his kids not to be stupid, then he’ll do it himself. 

  
  
  
  


Well. Brydie will do it. 

The Serpents put her through nursing school, and now it’s time to inflict her brand of health class on the new generation.

  
  
  
  


“Sit your ass down, boy, or you’ll be out so Goddamn fast …”

Sweet Pea is the first to revolt. Natch. One mention of tampons and he damn near knocked his chair over trying to leave, spouting something about ‘stupid girly shit.’ He’s already claimed to know everything he needs to about sex; Brydie turned on him with a quiz that would make Dr Ruth blush and told him to pay attention before he hurt himself. He pouted, but put up with it until the period talk started. 

Now all the boys are green around the gills, getting a graphic lecture that the school nurse sure as hell wouldn’t get away with, and the girls are sitting, smug as anything, and no doubt thinking, ‘that’s right, you assholes. Not so funny now, is it?’

Even FP’s a little nauseous, and thanking fuck he has a dick instead. 

Brydie’s gonna put the fear of God into these little shits. 

Good. 

He dozes off somewhere between birth control failure rates (higher than he thought), and STD infection rates (lower than when he was a kid, thanks to the internet, but still too high.) He sneaks out when she breaks out what looks like literal porn and starts critiquing it, jabbing her bony finger in the boys’ faces and yelling about foreplay and selfish men who wouldn’t know a clit if it slapped them in the face. 

The look on his boy’s face tells him enough - this isn’t the time for father/son bonding, so he’s out of there.

The mandatory classes continue for six consecutive Saturdays, and he notices that things are shifting among the younger Serpents. The boys aren’t making gross remarks about the dancers anymore, and it’s been a while since used condoms have littered the back of the bar. Brydie tells him that the boys are scared shitless to have sex at all, while a few of the girls have haltingly asked her about more fool-proof birth control like Depo, implants and the Pill. She hooks them up, and the Serpents foot the bill. 

On the last Saturday, Brydie gives them all Costco-sized boxes of condoms and a pack of tampons, and she makes the boys swear on their dicks to wrap it up, every time. 

It’s probably the best outlay of cash he’s authorized since taking over the gang. 

  
  


*

*

*

Jughead knows what sex is. Knows what periods are. Maybe he didn’t know quite as much about them before as he does now, but he wasn’t completely ignorant. Not like Sweet Pea, who thought girls pee out of their vaginas. And said so out loud.

Brydie laughs like a witch. It’s fucking terrifying. 

He’s seriously considering monkhood by the time she’s done with them all, because there’s no way in hell he’s ever putting a girl through childbirth, which, to hear Brydie talk, is akin to having a red-hot poker shoved up your ass while someone saws your balls off with a butter knife. She showed them a video, and he believes her. 

But, now he also knows that implants and birth control shots are 99 percent effective, and condoms are over 85 percent effective in practice, if higher in theory, and that foreplay is very, _ very _important. 

He’s going to have nightmares about her lecture on oral sex. He knows it. 

.

.

.

Two years later, up to his tonsils in Betty Cooper, he’s almost grateful to Brydie and her explicit lectures. His girlfriend makes the most incredible sounds when he goes down on her, writhing on the bed and rubbing her delicious self all over his face, panting his name when he makes her come over and over again. 

She asked him once how he got so good at it, and he didn’t tell her that his homework was once to practice on those little tubs of frosting that come with the giant cinnamon buns at the mall. 

He likes to eat. He did his homework.

The point is, he’s fallen in love with a girl who makes him want to put all his knowledge to good use, and he does. They have the safest sex humanly possible, and he makes it as good for her as he can, learning and practicing with her until he knows everything about her body and gets to bask in her satisfaction on a pretty regular basis - considering they’re in their senior year of high school and still have to do a fair amount of sneaking around. 

His dad makes sure there are always condoms under the bathroom sink, never past their expiry date. Her mom pointedly drags her to the doctor every two months and three weeks, like clockwork, for a pregnancy test and a shot, and even more pointedly ignores her daughter’s sex life the rest of the time. 

It’s more than they’d hoped for, honestly. The least they can do is to provide plausible deniability. 

The non-sexual part of sex ed comes in handy, too. The first time, back when Archie and Jughead’s friendship was on ice and Betty was all but cracking under the strain of her home life, happened in a particularly brutal history class (Kennedy called himself a jelly doughnut. Who cares? There are worse things a president can do. Nixon had way better scandals.) when Betty stood up to answer a question. 

He’d noticed her white jeans earlier in the day - way more than was appropriate for a friend - and he noticed them again, sitting behind her, for an entirely different reason. 

A quick glance around showed him that no one else could likely see the small stain on the back of her pants, and he dropped a notebook on her chair before she could sit back down.

She startled at the feeling and turned around in question as soon as the teacher was looking away. 

“Your period,” he whispered. “Blood on your chair.”

“Oh, my God.” She covered her face with her hands and peeked at him through her fingers. “On my jeans, too?”

He nodded and shrugged sympathetically. “A bit. Want my flannel?” He untied it and shifted in his own seat, handing it to her under his desk. 

She smiled gratefully and stood up, tying it around her waist and picking up her purse. Catching the teacher’s attention, she asked to leave the class and all but sprinted from the room. 

His clothes looked way too good on her. Even Veronica complimented her outfit: “Very grunge chic, Bettykins! Veronica Lodge approves.”

Later, presumably after Betty explained the circumstances of her new style, the look of approval Veronica sent him was both gratifying and terrifying.

  
  
  


The second time was a bit more … intimate. His dad was out of town for the weekend and Betty, his newly-minted girlfriend, was staying over for the first time. They weren’t having sex yet, still happily in the exploring stage, and he woke up on Saturday morning boneless and blissful. Betty was already up, which was to be expected, rummaging around in her backpack and swearing, which was not. 

“You okay, Betts?”

She whirled around in surprise. “Jug! Sorry, did I wake you?”

“Nah, just the call of nature.” He watched her rummage for another minute, and asked again, “so … do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

Her voice came out muffled because her head was in her backpack, but he caught enough to understand. 

“We have all that stuff here, you know.”

She popped out of the bag, her hair catching on the zipper, and blinked at him. “You do? Why?”

“For guests? Women do occasionally come over here.”

She looked flabbergasted, which he guessed was fair: two men in a trailer park who can barely manage to keep track of all the food groups and when to change the batteries on the smoke detector probably aren’t great candidates for who to ask for menstrual hygiene products. 

“Hang on, I’ll get them for you.” He clambered out of bed, wincing at the cold floor under his feet, and shuffled away. The tiny bathroom didn’t have a tub, but he started the shower anyway - the hot water took forever - and collected everything he thought Betty would need and balanced it on the edge of the sink. 

There was no counter, either. 

She was leaning against the wall in the hallway when he came out, and he almost blushed when he realized that she probably heard him relieving himself. Then he remembered why they were there in the first place and decided that their relationship had officially evolved past being embarrassed about perfectly natural things. 

The grateful smile she gave him when he opened the door to the steam-filled room spoke volumes, and he kissed her chastely, unwilling to add morning breath to the list of ‘perfectly natural things’ he was okay with inflicting on her. 

“If you give me your clothes, I can throw them in the laundry.” 

She started to protest and he cut her off: “I know how to get bloodstains out, don’t worry. I won’t ruin your stuff.”

“You’re one in a million, Jughead Jones.”

He made a mental note to thank Brydie for breaking down the barriers and went to get the box of salt. 

  
  
  
  


The third time comes many, many years down the road, when their daughter comes home from school in tears and storms up the stairs to her room, slamming the door so hard that the whole house shakes. Betty’s still at work, so Jughead is the one to take the stairs two at a time and knock lightly on the door that was once his. 

A miserable ‘come in’ is punctuated by a loud sniffle, and he cracks open the door and sticks his head into the room that used to be pink but now looks like Woodstock came for Christmas and never left. 

Mary Pendleton, Dell for short, sits on her psychedelic bedspread with a pale, miserable face, and her arms wrapped around her stomach. There’s a hoodie around her waist that he doesn’t recognize and she glares at him when he tries to sit on the bed. 

“You okay?”

“I’m _ fine _.”

He doesn’t remember himself or Betty being quite this moody as teenagers, but then his daughter’s never had to solve a murder, or bring down a cult, or damage the local drug trade. He supposes she needs some kind of outlet for her teen angst, and apparently, that outlet is going to be attitude.

He can live with that. 

“Tell that to your door frame.”

The glare she sends him feels like looking in the mirror and he wonders again how Betty feels to see Jughead’s expressions so perfectly mimicked on a face that looks like her own. It goes against everything Alice ever wanted.

“I got my period, okay?” Dell snaps, like she’s daring him to make a joke about it. 

He nods slowly, pondering. “First one?” He’s pretty sure it is, and he knows Betty’s talked to her about what will happen, but he also knows it can’t be fun when you aren’t expecting it. 

The sigh she lets out has to challenge her lung capacity, and if looks could kill … well his autobiography would play out a lot like his first novel did. “_ Yeah _, Dad.”

Thirteen years and he’s still not tired of being called Dad. Even when it sounds like a curse. “My sympathies, kid. Need anything from the drugstore?”

The scorn on her face is momentarily replaced by surprise, but she shakes her head and looks away. “Mom got me everything a few months ago. She said it would happen soon …” Dell gestures vaguely at her chest and then looks back and glares again. “People noticed and the whole football team _ laughed _ at me.”

It’s probably the first time he’s regretted keeping his family out of the Serpents. Decent sex-ed still isn’t a thing at Riverdale high, while Brydie, well into her 70s now, continues to terrify each new generation of gang members into respect and sensible behaviour. There hasn’t been an unplanned pregnancy in the gang in more than twenty years, and the dance was outlawed less than two years after her classes started. 

“I’m sorry, Delly. Ignorance makes people do stupid things. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, though. It happens to half the kids at your school.”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes - good _God_ how does Betty put up with two of them? - and doesn’t deign to answer him. 

“Ok, I can take a hint.” He heads back towards the hallway and pauses in the doorway. “Yell if you need anything. I’m here for you.”

Later, he takes a massive, Jones-special-ice-cream-sundae up to her room and catches her hanging out the window with a sappy look on her face, dropping the mystery hoodie down to a boy on their driveway. 

Jughead clears his throat loudly and leans against the doorframe, raising an eyebrow in silent question. 

“Dad!”

“Dell.”

She closes the window and saunters nonchalantly to the bookshelf, straightening books that don’t need to be straightened, and doesn’t answer.

“Knight in shining armour?”

She blushes, right to the roots of her hair, and shrugs, staring at her feet. “He’s just a friend. He lent me his sweater after … you know.”

Yeah. Yeah, he knows. 

xx


End file.
